After earning the unthinkably prestigious title of "America's Next Top Car Blogger" and doing weekends for the last 20 months, I have made the extremely tough decision to leave Jalopnik.

The increasing difficulty of the balancing act between my full time job, obligations to Jalopnik and general existence has made the choice to give up doing weekends an unfortunate but necessary one. Although I sincerely hope this will not be the last post I ever write here, this is it for now.

I want to thank Ray for giving me the chance to write for my favorite car blog, Matt for always helping me out when I needed it and all of you for reading and responding to my posts. It has truly been awesome getting to use my 26 years of automotive obsession for something besides filling my yard with gas guzzling vehicles older than I am.

I'm looking forward to seeing Jalopnik continue to grow in a new direction with Matt at the helm and I wish my replacement (more on this shortly) the best of luck. I'm also looking forward to finally having a little free time. First order of business — waking up my '57 Plymouth from its nearly two year hibernation.

(Tom has been a wonderful addition to Jalopnik and it's a little hard to imagine the weekends without him. Because of his high level of autonomy (possible because of his high level of skill), the weekends were the only time I got to read this site and not know what was coming next. For this reason I'd have preferred if Tom had given up his life, responsibilities, cars, et cetera for Jalopnik. He chose having a life. I think him for his almost two years of service and wish him the best with his project cars. — Ed.)